The opening line of Patti Smith’s Horses – ‘Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine’ – still retains its power to tighten the blood. For me the record is about being sixteen, sitting by the window of an attic bedroom in a town I wanted to leave, listening to Smith’s savage vocal coming through on a shitty hifi and one dodgy speaker, ribbons turning on the dayglo green cassette with its handwritten label. The album filled me with passion and purpose every time I heard it. I couldn’t listen to ‘Birdland’ without feeling like I was actually there; and at sixteen I had no idea where Birdland was.

Autobiographies are notoriously self-serving, providing an opportunity for public figures to rake up old grudges and settle arguments of no value or interest to anyone but the author and their past and present intimates. (Think Alan Partridge: ‘Needless to say, I had the last laugh.’) Smith’s book is a fine corrective. On a July day in 1967, the twenty-one year old Patti Smith left her dying New Jersey town and got the Broadway bus to Philadelphia. The fare to NYC had almost doubled since her last visit. Thinking of calling home, Smith went into a phone box, where she found a mislaid purse containing more than enough to cover her journey. Just Kids is full of moments like this; flashes of coincidence and deus ex machina that no writer would dare use in fiction, but that frequently obtain in real life.

The buildings and infrastructure are as important as, if not more important than, the cast of characters. The settings – the M25 and its miniature familiar, the Brooklands race track; the glowing dome of the Metro-Centre itself; Sangster’s school; Julia Greenwood’s hospital – are imprinted on the mind as much by constant repetition of their appearance and qualities as by the author’s use of active verbs when referring to them: “The Metro-Centre withdrew behind me…”, “Giant floes of black concrete emerged from the darkness”. Inanimate objects are described in ways that can make them seem more alive than the characters observing them: “Eddies of scum circled aimlessly, exhausted by the attempt…”

Ballard’s satire is grimly funny. It makes you align your facial muscles in something closer to a grimace than a smile. In one of two jibes at Auntie, we are told that the Metro-Centre’s cable channel has ratings higher than those for BBC2. (Ballard’s most recent exposure on terrestrial TV was as the subject of ITV’s South Bank Show.)

For fans of Ballard, Kingdom Come is a rich source of pleasure from page one. His distinctive prose immediately sets up expectations of a particular kind of content. Ballard has gone through the phase of having the adjective that describes his own work applied to that of other writers, so that now it is used by reviewers tackling new work by Ballard himself. By holding back most of his work from publication during his lifetime, Kafka managed never to be saddled with the adjective Kafkaesque while he was alive. Ballard’s work, however, is increasingly described as Ballardian.

When the box of stuff arrived in the huge grey palace of the central committee, the officials prodded and sniffed the contents, before passing it on, perplexed, to the scientists. In air-tight rooms with reinforced glass windows, the stuff was burned, frozen, melted, cut, blended, squashed and exploded with careful measurements being taken. As the scientists gathered their results, they became afraid. So did the central committee as they read the report. They had no choice but to present their findings to the glorious leader — a big old man with a deep voice and grey hair from the burden of ruling the country all his life. ‘What?’ he raged, ‘a thing of no use, it is not possible!’

Ewan Morrison, the celebrated author of Ménage and other novels, showcases his first short story for children in 3:PM Magazine. “Stuff” is an allegory full of humour and scathing satire — think Brothers Grimm meet George Orwell. The author is interviewed in 3:AMhere.

Hip-lit for cyberkids sounds really corny, I know, but you get my drift. What we want to do with 3:PM Magazine — which we launched this week — is find out if authors who usually write for adults can express themselves fully when addressing a younger, pre-teen audience. We are also interested in seeing if experimentalliterarytechniques can transfer successfully to fiction for children: who’s going to write the first nouveau roman for kids? Apart from that, we intend to ask writers what children’s books still influence their work (see Stuart Evers‘s essay on the Bumper Book of Football Stories) and develop the site’s visual side, so any illustrators willing to work for love, please contact us. Never mind Harry Potter, the revolution starts here.

Like many Londoners, I felt a sense of loss and outrage on passing the site of the Middlesex Hospital. A building that once dominated the skyline raised to the ground. Walking a little bit further I passed the offices of the Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Association. In their window I saw they had a petition going — towards property developers Candy & Candy, who planned to build luxury flats on Ground Zero called…Noho Square.

A sense of outrage welled up inside of me. It was then and there that I decided to make the short film Viva Fitzrovia as audio-visual support for this petition. The subsequent property crash led to Candy & Candy selling off their interest in the site. So the petition then became redundant, but not the sentiments of my proposed film — to highlight the threats to our heritage posed by corporate culture and to celebrate the area of London that we like to call Fitzrovia.

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Post-Nearly Press are publishing two volumes of in-depth interviews with Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, both conducted by Neil Jackson. Only a limited number of copies will be produced. “When they’re gone that’s it,” says Neil, “it’s a theme that crops up in the conversations.”

The Sohemian Society presents… Jeremy Reed at The Wheatsheaf, 25 Rathbone Place, North Soho, W1 Wednesday March 18th, 7.30pm The Dilly is the first comprehensive examination of male prostitution at London’s Piccadilly Circus from the nineteenth century to the present day. On the fringes of Soho, Piccadilly has long been London’s principal location for the […]